What is our relationship to the things we don't know? Do they make us curious, like two-year-olds sticking their fingers in electrical sockets, or do they inspire a fear of the unknown—the malicious spirit waiting to capture everyone who isn't in bed at 9? To borrow from the web series 'Stranger Things', what we don't know—our curiosities, but also our fears and anxieties—may well be the 'Upside Down'.

This week, we're walking the fringes of the Upside Down as we gently probe the limits of our reality and perception. Our opinion piece considers the work of three artists — James Turrell, Kimsooja and Lee Eunsun — specifically their preoccupation with light, positing their embodied sense of time and place as a “counterbalance to our digitally accelerated lives”. At Ishara Art Foundation in Dubai, street aesthetics pervade a white cube

gallery space, questioning how we define art or even ascribe value to it. A review of 'Architecture and Video Games: Intersecting Worlds' invokes similarities between the two disciplines, both suited to collaborative worldbuilding and spatial storytelling. Japanese designer Takuto Ohta roots his work in abstraction, arriving at form (and function) through a childlike sense of play.

A parallel dimension, the Upside Down mimics the topography of the real world but populates it with unfamiliar beings, corralling their sentience into a destructive 'hivemind'. What is real for you? Is it what you can see, hear and touch? Or is it the life you live online? Does being beyond human perception, or outside of it, make something 'unreal'? Is this note for real?